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Archive for June, 2014

Note the bubble on the right hand side… not too level is it?
This is the northern wall of our roll off roof observatory. It was level when we built it back in 2003 but over the past 11 years the ground has sunk slightly and now when the roof rolls, not all of the wheels touch anymore.
This makes it harder to move the roof. It looks like it is time this weekend to jack up the sinking side of the observatory and correct this issue.

A visit to the Beaver Ponds Estate 2014 Garlic Field Day.
This was a Sunday 4 or 5 hour meeting of Garlic Growers to learn and share information about the latest in the Garlic Growing field.
I lost track but I think you are looking at over 3500 garlic plants… over 200? types to boot.
Good information about the leak moth, bulb and stem nematodes and methods to combat them.
The best info to come out of this was to use a 3 year crop rotation scheme where the two fallow years should be spent in growing mustard and barley and cutting it down and tilling it in as often as possible (to combat the nematodes). To combat the leek moth, not much except covering (tightly!) the garlic with row cover. That’s a lot of work and tends to interfere with weeding and watering.

The first regular season game in the Canadian Football League (CFL) for the Saskatchewan Roughriders will be against the Hamilton Tiger Cats, in Regina at 7pm EDT.
This is the team they played against for the Cup last November.

There will be competition from the World Cup football 2014 in Brazil, but Canada is not even in that event.

After winning the CFL Grey Cup last year, Saskatchewan has gone through a *lot* of roster changes. It will be difficult to sort through these and know even 1/2 of the players come game time.

The RASC-Kingston Centre met last night (Thursday June 12th) from 19:00-21:15 in Ellis Hall Room 324 at Queen’s University in Kingston.

Introduction were made, announcements and discussion about the national RASC organization, upcoming astronomical events and then we launched into two presentations from members:
Richard Weigand on his foray into the Isabel Williamson Lunar Observing Certificate Program and
Hank Bartlett on his recent experiences in the southern hemisphere astronomy and Machu Pichu in Peru.

Following that were presentations on The Torus Project, the RMC project, and members observing reports including ones from Susan Gagnon, Bruce Elliott, Rose-Marie Burke and myself.

Refreshments were available during the break along with a small swap meet.
A good meeting and a good visit with you all! A reminder that there will be no meetings in July and August.

The Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society (Napanee’s Garden Club), met on Wednesday 2014 June 11th at the Napannee Fire Hall community/training room.
The topic of the night was food… a potluck dinner before the July break. The food was great and 32 people were in attendance.
Images from the past year were displayed on the projection screen during dinner.

The date, time and location of the summer BBQ, held in August, were announced as well.

This is what we used for heating in the winter over 2013/2014. It is a dump truck load of firewood, approximately 2 cords.
It took about 5-6 person hours to stack inside shelter and this went over two days.

This year we are trying out something drier and packaged better and hopefully better overall:

wood pellets.

This pile took only 2 person hours to stack and was much better on the back and arms. Stacking was also much easier as one did not have to arrange the split wood into specific places and orientations to form a stable pile. Even then the pile was not so stable.

We think this will provide the same amount or more heat than did the pile of firewood this winter.
Oh yes… you are looking at 3 tons. 150 bags of 40 lbs each (or 18kg).
50 bags@40lb=2000lbs=1 ton, 50 bags@18kg=900kg=1 tonne. give or take.

This was mounted and the process to copy all of the data from the two 1TB drives was started using rsync -auvxz /source /destination
It looks like it was moving about 40GB/hour and it took around 30 hours to completed the 1.2TB of data transfer.
Since new data was being added from various systems over this 30 hour time period, the rsync process was run again, this time in less than 5 minutes, to bring the 3TB drive up to date.

The drives were dismounted, rearranged in /etc/fstab and remounted again allowing the 3TB drive to be the primary data drive and the two 1TB drives to be partners in data backup.

A four hour job on Saturday morning led to the removal of the observatory roll off roof wheels (they were low profile 1″ rollers that did not roll well) and the installation of new 2.5″ wheels (4 on each rail) mounted on a 2″x4″x8′ piece of lumber.
Additionally, a 2″x4″x8′ fence was attached to the wall, to keep the wheels on the rail, and then after the fact, a 5/4″x6″x8′ piece of cedar was attached to the rolling roof section as a skirt to block the open gap where the wheels were.
Cedar will also not require staining and will not rot (as we discovered some 10 years old pieces of wood). This will stop blowing rain from getting in.

The acid test – moving the roof with much less force… and it worked! Right out of the box as it were.
History: we started with teflon pads and melamine to slide the roof, but that quickly broke down once the roof has a little bit of snow load on it. The friction was just too much. What followed over the years were various low profile wheels to match the design of the teflon pads. In the end, larger wheels had to be added, needing a redesign of a lot of the roof structure, stops, end wall extensions, holddowns, etc. There still exists gaps at the end of the wheel structure that needs to be plugged with something flexible, in case it comes into contact with the rail.

The last of the vegetables have been planted. By my count (which is almost certainly off), 55 heirloom tomato plants of 12 types were planted in the ground this past weekend.
We got off to an early start this year with the staking of 2″x2″x42′ stakes, to help tie up the plants later on.
We also had some leftover straw (not hay!) and used it to lightly mulch the area.
A few hours after planting we discovered adult Colorado Potato bugs eating the potato-leaf types of tomato and laying eggs already! We think they winter over in the soil and pop up in the spring.

This is a Seagate Barracuda Green 2tb sata hard drive with a date code of 12181 (which is 2011 October 31). It is a model # ST2000DL003.

It failed Sunday morning. That was the terror part. It was the main data drive for us and it had a *lot* of data on it. checked with support.seagate.com/warranty – out of warranty. Less than 2 years old.
After an hour or testing it, or attempting to test it with various drive recovery processes, we gave it up for dead and started working on getting the data backup drives up and online as live. That went very smoothly with the linux server and within 2 hours we were back up and operational again.

In the meantime a new 3TB drive is on order and should arrive in a day or two, and it is not Seagate.
Over the years we have had dozens of drives fail. Of all types. But there is something about the warranty, support and general feeling about one brand over another that is hard to dismiss.
The hard part will be to transfer all of the data from the databackup drives to the new one… that may take a *lot* of time.

*ALL* hard drives fail. Eventually. Plan for that occurance and things will go a lot less stressful for you when they do.